Get Recruiting Insights on LinkedIn and Find More Recruits With This Crazy Good Recruiting Hack

Last week’s hack, “The Recruiting Hack that LinkedIn Doesn’t Want You to Know About“, was so popular that we decided to share another recruiting hack that shows you how to pull valuable recruiting insights from LinkedIn. Oh, and you’ll be able to expand your sourcing network too. First, to give credit where credit is due, we learned about this hack from Irina Shamaeva, a master people sourcer and Boolean search guru. Follow her on Twitter for good sourcing tips.

HERE’S HOW IT WORKS
Open a browser (we always recommend Chrome). Make sure in one of the tabs you’re logged into LinkedIn. Use this shortened URL – https://goo.gl/i9gWix . You don’t need to be a Premium member to use this recruiting hack. Next, you’ll be brought to a page on LinkedIn that looks like this:

With over 365 million user profiles on LinkedIn, we’re now looking at a very large data set full of industry information that we can analyze to look for useful information and patterns. For example, we are looking for engineers in the Fort Collins, CO area to work on our applicant tracking system. So, in the search box we entered the keyword “HTML5”. You can also enter a phrase, skill or industry. Next, we clicked search and LinkedIn aggregated data on all of the people on LinkedIn who have included the keyword “HTML5” in their profile and tells us where they live, where they work, their role and where they went to school. The results will look like the screenshot below. You can also use the arrows on either side to toggle and discover more information.

Now we want to narrow the scope of the search. Specifically, we want to narrow our search for people that attended Colorado State University because we want to recruit people that either still live in Fort Collins or may be willing to return to the area for a career opportunity. Here’s what this looks like.

Ok, now we’re starting to focus in on some data that we can make actionable. We know that there are quite a few people that went to Colorado State who have “HTML5” in their profiles. And, we now can see where they work. Check out the screenshot below. It looks like there are quite a few people at HP (HP has an office in Fort Collins) that likely work on HTML5-based projects. Bingo.

This is where it gets even more interesting. Next, we clicked on HP and chose to isolate people by “what they do”. In the screenshot below you can see those categories highlighted in blue. And, you can see that LinkedIn is even suggesting people’s profiles that match our query. Boom. Now we have specific profiles of people that we want to add to our network. You can bet our recruiters are going to be talking to some very likely prospects this week.

THE RECRUITING HACK THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
Opening an office and want to examine the talent pool? Try this hack. Want to establish a strong alumni recruiting campaign? Try this hack. Building a hit list of companies that you are going to recruit from? Try this hack. There are all sorts of things you can do with this recruiting hack. Leave a comment and share your brilliant use of this hack. Hack on recruiters.

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